My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I will try to keep my remarks brief.
It is extremely helpful that we have the opportunity to talk about this labelling question. I see it more as a kind of aperitif for our later discussion of AI regulation writ large. Given that it is literally aperitif hour, I shall just offer a small snifter as to why I think there may be some challenges around labelling—again, perhaps that is not a surprise to the noble Baroness.
When we make rules, as a general matter we tend to assume that people are going to read them and respond in a rationalist, conformist way. In reality, particularly in the internet space, we often see that there is a mixed environment and there will be three groups. There are the people who will look at the rules and respond in that rational way to them; a large group of people will just ignore them—they will simply be unaware and not
at all focused on the rules; and another group will look for opportunities to subvert them and use them to their own advantage. I want to comment particularly on that last group by reference to cutlery and call centres, two historic examples of where rules have been subverted.
On the cutlery example, I am a Sheffielder, and “Made in Sheffield” used to mean that you had made the entire knife in Sheffield. Then we had this long period when we went from knives being made in Sheffield to bringing them to Sheffield and silver-plating them, to eventually just sharpening them and putting them in boxes. That is relevant in the context of AI. Increasingly, if there is an advantage to be gained by appearing to be human, people will look at what kind of finishing you need, so: “The content may have been generated by AI but the button to post it was pushed by a human, therefore we do not think it is AI because we looked at it and posted it”. On the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, does the fact that my noble friend intervened on him and the noble Lord had to use some of his own words now mean that his speech in Hansard would not have to be labelled “AI-generated” because we have now departed from it? Therefore, there is that question of individuals who will want something to appear human-made even if it was largely AI-generated, and whether they will find the “Made in Sheffield” way of bypassing it.
Interestingly, we may see the phenomenon flipping the other way, and this is where my call centres come in. If people go to a popular search engine and type in “SpinVox”, they will see the story of a tech company that promised to transcribe voicemails into written text. This was a wonderful use of technology, and it was valued on the basis that it had developed that fantastic technology. However, it turned out—or at least there were claims, which I can repeat here under privilege—that it was using call centres in low-cost, low-wage environments to type those messages out. Therefore, again, we may see, curiously, some people seeing an advantage to presenting content as AI-generated when it is actually made by humans. That is just to flag that up—as I say, it is a much bigger debate that we are going to have. It is really important that we are having it, and labelling has a role to play. However, as we think about it, I urge that we remember those communities of people who will look at whatever rules we come up with and say, “Aha! Where can I get advantage?”, either by claiming that something is human when it is generated by AI or claiming that it is generated by AI if it suits them when it was actually produced by humans.
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